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Exclusive Passion
Interviews:
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Though he does not have the reputation of Brad Pitt or the acclaim of Sean Penn, in the 1990s, Tim Robbins rapidly established himself as the most reliable leading man in Hollywood, equally adept as both a vulnerable audience insert and a smirking anti-hero. With his slicked-back hairdo and sizeable stature (standing at 2 meters tall), Robbins had a naturalistic watchability that made him the perfect anchor for some of the most acclaimed films of the decade and a muse for vaunted auteurs from Robert Altman to Brian De Palma.In the 21st century, the aging Robbins has shrewdly shifted his attention to supporting roles, including one in Mystic River (2003), which earned him a much-deserved Academy Award. Recently, it has been the role of independent filmmakers to utilize most of his talents and producers at HBO, who cast Robbins as the Secretary of State in the cruelly overlooked miniseries The Brink. And then, of course, there’s his respectable output behind the camera: 1992’s Bob Roberts adapted a cult comedy caricature from Saturday Night Live into one of the finest political satires of the post-Cold War era, whereas Dead Man Walking’s musings about life on death row earned leading lady Susan Sarandon an Oscar.
This top 10 list will act as both an overview of Robbins’ decades-long contributions to American cinema and an evaluation of his finest performances to date, including stone-cold classics and underrated gems.
10. Mission to Mars (2000)
Mission to Mars is certainly the gutsiest film ever to take its name from a Disneyland ride. Brian De Palma‘s direction is typically virtuosic, Ennio Morricone’s score imbues the entire film with sweeping spectacle, and the cast is stacked with some of the era’s most reliable performers. The result is a film both admirable in its ambition and visual clarity but restrained in its execution due to studio interference and shoddy visual effects. Whilst Gary Sinise leads the cast, it’s Robbins who, as Commander Blake, gives the most rewarding performance with a distinctive character arc ending with the ultimate sacrifice and the movie’s most memorable scene.
As Saving Private Ryan realizes, in a story centering on the recovery of a person, the audience’s desire to see the character found is as much motivated by the search party’s likability as it is sympathy for the missing person. For all of its myriad flaws, Mission to Mars understands this, and the dynamics between the traveling space crew are fully realized, and the chemistry between the performers is palpable. Don’t be dissuaded by the poor reviews from some critics. Mission to Mars is a worthwhile revisit whose influence on subsequent sci-fi epics (The Martian in particular) is undeniable.
I just love Carlito’s Way, because it’s, for me – coming from the disco point of view – it’s actually one of the few films made after the era that could have well been made within it, if you see what I mean. There’s very few movies – and Saturday Night Fever is obviously, you know, the one that’s going to do it – and all the others that came along didn’t quite get it right, whereas Carlito’s Way got it exactly right. I do have a couple of issues with a few of the songs that are in there that are actually out of the time loop. But other than that, for me, if you’re a De Palma fan, if you’re a gangster fan, if you’re a disco fan, it is the perfect movie. And I also – I’m going to bore you to death with disco by the end of this, I’m sure – but I mean, I’ve just written my autobiography, which is called DISCOMANIA! And basically what it is, is my favorite disco movies of all time, of which Carlito’s Way is one. Why they’re important to me, what memories they spark, and the tracks in it that actually take me back to my era of the punk-disco seventies. So that’s where it’s all coming from.
Bouzereau, whose previous books include The De Palma Cut, The Cutting Room Floor, Spielberg: The First Ten Years, and Hitchcock, Piece by Piece, among several others, has been making behind-the-scenes documentaries surrounding films by De Palma, Spielberg, and countless others for decades now. He is also working on a documentary about film composer John Williams.
In The Pocket Essential Brian De Palma (2000), John Ashbrook writes about Carlito's Way, "This is De Palma's first film noir. Essentially, the noir protagonist is a character with too much past and not enough future. Redemption is only achievable with death, because only with the full payment of all outstanding debts can the books be cleared. In essence, Carlito is dead before the film begins. As he tells Kleinfeld, 'I was dead and buried and you dug me up!' Consequently, he is now living on borrowed time. He has been given a chance to undo some of the evils of his life, but he fails. His time is wasted."
As Gail says while looking at Carlito in the mirror, "I know how this dream ends, Charlie..."
Well before it turned 30, Carlito’s Way was already an anniversary picture: A reunion between Pacino, De Palma, producer Martin Bregman and Universal Pictures, almost exactly a decade after they all worked together on Scarface. (The concept of Pacino doing a Latino accent was allowed to tag along too, apparently.) Scarface’s reputation grew in stature since its respectable, unremarkable box office performance in 1983, as it became a gangster classic, an iconic Pacino vehicle and the inspiration for a number of high-profile rappers. Carlito’s Way is also probably better-regarded now than it was at the time of its original release, but though it did inspire a later direct-to-DVD prequel indicating some youth-market interest, it hasn’t reached Scarface heights of imitation, homage or (despite that great silhouette) dorm-room poster ubiquity. But it’s the better film of the two – maybe even De Palma’s best overall. The director himself seems to think so: “I can’t make a better picture than this,” he recalls thinking to himself while rewatching the movie a few months after it debuted to middling business in the U.S. (See the wonderful documentary De Palma for a candid play-by-play of this and all of his other movies.)At the time, though, Carlito’s Way was oddly received as an awards-season also-ran, on the heels of Pacino’s recent Oscar win for Scent of a Woman, just about six months earlier. That career context provides – whether intentional or not – De Palma’s smaller-than-usual dose of meta-movie playfulness. Early in the film, Pacino’s Carlito gets a new lease on life when an evidence-tampering technicality springs him from a 30-year prison sentence after only five years. He then insists on addressing the courtroom, talking about how he’s been vindicated by the law, with a hamminess not too far removed from his climactic Scent of a Woman grandstanding. As if to point out the artifice of this performance, the visibly irritated judge tells him to cut it out: “You’re not accepting an award,” he says, though the last time much of the audience had seen Pacino, he was doing just that. Carlito is undeterred and continues his speech.
If that’s an in-joke, it’s an outlier. Apart from one other seeming wink at the audience, when another character informs Carlito that he could pass for Italian (some might say more readily than he could pass for Puerto Rican or Cuban!), the movie finds both Pacino and De Palma in a more reflective mood. Carlito really does want to use his second chance to go straight, earn enough money to buy into a car-rental business a friend runs in the Bahamas, and leave 1970s New York City behind. It turns out that his ticket out of prison is also his ticket back into the life he no longer wants: His lawyer Dave Kleinfeld (Sean Penn) gets him a job running a club, but then eventually Dave needs a big favor, and the movie’s final 45 minutes kick into gear with sweaty, inexorably mounting tension.
If the movie often avoids the operatic grandeur of Scarface — no “World Is Yours” blimp, no coke mountain, no opulent bubble bath – Carlito’s Way also feels less constrained by its own story. “Constrained” might seem like an odd descriptor for a movie as sprawling as Scarface, but once Tony Montana scraps his way to a place in the drug trade, the less overt desperation slackens the movie, which turns repetitive before its big memorable finale. (Michelle Pfeiffer’s Elvira, Tony’s wife, memorably complains about both his obsession with money and his default “fuck”-laden mode of expression, as if to anticipate complaints about the movie itself.) In the earlier film, De Palma doesn’t always seem especially fascinated by the ins and outs of criminal activity (certainly not with the hopped-up attention of his pal Martin Scorsese), maybe because there isn’t an explicit voyeur figure whose point of view he can readily identify with.
Carlito, on the other hand, is a quieter, more observant character, narrating his own story with a weariness Pacino would tease out further in future roles. Also: Isn’t a guy attempting to bluff his way out of a tight corner, as in that early shoot-out, actually more compelling than the guy who, waiting for attackers behind a door and hollering threats, actually does have a gigantic-ass loaded machine gun at his disposal? The beginning of that Carlito’s Way sequence, where Carlito notices that something is amiss when his young cousin drags him along on a money drop, generates its suspense from the way De Palma makes his camera an extension of Pacino’s subtle wariness. Similarly, an extended chase sequence late in the film that moves from a subway car to Grand Central Station, delays its carnage until the very end; much of it involves watching Pacino run, hide and think on his feet, in a series of long takes that don’t flinch away from the walls closing in on him.
Elsewhere in the film, there are moments where the star turns up his volume knob, going from Pacino to PACINO, but like that courtroom scene and that big trailer line, they tend to be instances of Carlito performing toward his (legitimate) tough-guy image. When they’re not – when he’s arguing with Gail (Penelope Ann Miller), the ex-girlfriend he looks up post-incarceration, or confronting Penn’s maddening Kleinfeld – the fireworks are chased with a sense of palpable despair. De Palma seems to key into that contrast between an ex-gangster’s street-level reputation and private doubts, and the setpiece scrapes Carlito gets into feel more dangerous as a result. De Palma can still direct the hell out of a juicy stalking scene – Kleinfeld has a miniature doozy after the mob realizes he’s ripped them off and killed a made guy – without relying on the addictive dream logic of his more id-like, movie-drunk thrillers.
If that occasionally leaves Carlito’s Way moving at a leisurely pace compared to the spring-loaded craziness of Body Double or Dressed to Kill, well, it’s still 20-something minutes shorter than Scarface, and a lot more soulful. Typically when De Palma returns to certain motifs, they crackle with knowing wit. (I recall, as I often do, the satisfied laughter of a crowd at New York Film Festival beholding Passion when someone brings up the idea of identical twins, as if to say: Finally!) Carlito’s Way has plenty of familiar bits: The questionable loyalty to an unstable friend who the hero “owes,” a one-last-job-then-I’m-out proposition, the doomed romanticism of the reformed criminal who can’t fully extricate himself from that life. Yet the movie feels genuinely poignant, even – or especially – when it feels like it’s echoing Scarface: The wall-sized images of paradise seen in the earlier film are shrunk down to a little subway ad that captures Carlito’s attention in his final moments. Though Carlito’s Way doesn’t need Scarface to work as a piece of top-notch entertainment, it does feel grander and more accomplished in that better-loved movie’s shadow. De Palma’s masterful flourishes are also, in the end, easing us out of the stylish fugue created by larger-than-life images of gangsters. Tony Montana goes out in a blaze of glory – he dies big time. Carlito Brigante only wants to slip away.
Join us for a rare Q&A will Paul Williams, moderated by Jesse Kowalski, Chief Curator, who will speak with Paul Williams alongside clips of his roles in movies, television series, and concerts from the 1960s to today. Film clips include his performances in Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973), Phantom of the Paradise (1974), Smokey and the Bandit (1977), The Muppet Movie (1979), and Baby Driver (2017). Williams will also be asked about his guest-starring roles on The Odd Couple (1974), The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteriesand The Brady Bunch Variety Hour (1977), Fantasy Island (1981), Community (2014), and a special appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. In addition, we will show rare clips of the Carpenters, Elvis Presley, the cast of Ishtar (1987), and others singing his memorable songs. The audience is encouraged to take part in the Q&A.
“I’ve always looked to directors over actors for personal style,” says Hagop Kourounian, who operates the popular Instagram account @directorfits, on which he chronicles the fashion highlights of auteurs past and present. Some recent favorites of his include the look Justine Triet wore while accepting the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, “this bulky, double-breasted blazer, and hardly any makeup except for red lipstick. She just looked really elegant, I thought.” And at the Telluride Film Festival, “Wim Wenders had this insane goth ninja look, with this big black fedora on.” Wenders, Kourounian has found, often breaks out pieces like the Adidas Y-3 Qasa, “which is a shoe that was popular maybe eight or nine years ago. It’s kind of weird to see it back now. I’m sure he just pulled it out of a closet somewhere.”That’s one of the exciting things about following directors’ style: They don’t necessarily opt for the most on-trend, au courant piece. They’re shopping their closets, and their archives run deep. Directors are also dressing for a physical job, so they favor function: for every Sam Raimi in his impeccable suits, you’ll see a Brian De Palma in safari wear, or Tony Scott in a fishing vest crammed with filmmaking gear. (“That vest was originally designed for [storing] bait and tackle. Now, it’s being used in a totally different work setting, but it still is purposeful,” says Kourounian. “That’s a thing of beauty, in my opinion.”)
The account has also tracked the way some directors go method with their on-set fashion, like Stanley Kubrick wearing a Vietnam-era army jacket for Full Metal Jacket. Greta Gerwig favors boiler suits, directing Barbie in the garment, including a bubblegum-pink version from Pistola. For the prom scene in Lady Bird, she wore a prom dress, just like the cast members. “She said she was trying to do a little bit of cosplay to get her actors in the spirit,” Kourounian explains. “She was one of them in that moment.”
The inspiration goes both ways, with directors’ aesthetics spilling over into their characters’ wardrobes at times. Kourounian notes that Bill Murray’s character in The Royal Tenenbaums “is dressed identically to Wes Anderson in that era, down to the John Lennon-style circular glasses,” and that even the animated Fantastic Mr. Fox features a main character in one of Anderson’s signature suits. Sofia Coppola falls into this category, too: “There’s this amazing photo of her and Rashida Jones on the set of On the Rocks: both of them are wearing the same identical green work pants, and they’re hiked up in the same way.”
The visual precision directors bring to every part of their onscreen work is often reflected in their wardrobes as well. “Directors, especially auteurs, are such creative, world-building people who have all-encompassing visions. There’s no way what they’re wearing wasn’t premeditated and meticulously thought-out.” Paul Schrader is a frequently featured fit god on the account. “It’s not like he’s just wearing something just to wear it, or because it’s popular. It’s almost like a costume designer trying to build an outfit for a character. You can understand a lot about who he is through this very buttoned-up uniform he puts on.”
Asked about the directors he thinks are slept-on style-wise, Kourounian cites De Palma, whose aesthetic feels inspired by a previous generation of filmmakers, “like a John Ford, John Huston kind of vibe. I guess even your favorite director has a favorite director.” A more obscure style icon is sexploitation auteur Doris Wishman, who sports what he calls “these very chic, Old Hollywood-ish looks.”